For most people in Europe, cultural and intellectual life in 1450 was still very closely linked to religion, though this was slowly beginning to change. Monasteries, convents, and cathedral schools had been the main avenues to basic literacy since the tenth century for all but the elite who could afford to hire private tutors; by the twelfth century, wealthy businessmen in a few cities had established small schools to teach reading and arithmetic, but even these used religious texts as their basic reading matter. Beginning in the twelfth century, some of these cathedral or municipal schools developed into universities, teaching law, medicine, theology, and philosophy to older male students, along with a more general curriculum - the “liberal arts” - to somewhat younger boys and men. Students at these universities, even those not studying theology or planning on a church career, were considered to be clergy in terms of legal jurisdiction and tax issues - the technical term is that they were in “minor orders” - though their regular participation in riots, drunken brawls, and similar disturbances often made this status a headache for city governments.
Universities shaped the culture and economic life of the cities in which they were located, such as Bologna, Oxford, Paris, or Salamanca, with rooming houses, dormitories (often called “colleges”), taverns, brothels, specialized stores, and other establishments catering to their needs. The number of universities increased slowly from the twelfth century onward; in 1300, there were fifteen to twenty universities in Europe, and by 1500, there were over fifty.
University education and the preparatory study that led to it were all conducted in Latin, which meant that scholars from Coimbra in Portugal to Krakow in Poland could communicate with one another, and that students could travel from one university to another, which they frequently did. Learning Latin served as a sort of male puberty rite for urban boys with an eye to careers that required university study, bonding them together and setting them off from the rest of the population, who spoke a variety of local dialects. Scholars corresponded and published in Latin until the eighteenth century, and university classes in many subjects continued to be held in Latin until the nineteenth century.
Though Latin dominated scholarly discourse, beginning in the fourteenth century writers in some parts of Europe began to use their local dialects rather than Latin for poems and stories, and these local dialects slowly developed into the vernacular literary languages of Italian, French, English, and others. This new type of literature was the result of - and spur to - increasing levels of vernacular literacy in the cities of Europe; alongside schools teaching boys Latin, small schools, often little more than a room or corner of someone’s house, had begun to teach boys - and a few girls - basic reading, writing, and figuring.
World History
